Birds

Birds are pesky things that inhabit my SETI station. They must be rooted out and destroyed without mercy.

What is a bird:

If I spin the dial of the SETI Net receiver in the SSB or CW mode I can hear tweets as the receiver moves past certain frequencies on the dial. These are most often the result of signals in the neighborhood (the router used by my friend next door, the signal generator I use for a test signal,etc) or they are signals generated by the receiver itself.

Each time I start an automatic scan the same bird shows up time after time no matter where I point my antenna. This is because the birds don't come through the antenna but enter the system in all the little side doors, nooks and crannies of the electronics. This has to stop.

What is needed is a table of birds that can be ignored during the search. When the receiver is about to be tuned to the area of a bird it will simply be skipped over.

Birds that live inside the receiver can be determined by terminating the antenna input of the receiver with a dummy load and then scanning the entire 100 MHz of the search area. Any hits detected are then routed to the bird list . The list below is the first category of birds - the ones that live inside the receiver itself.

The chart below is ordered by frequency bands. The 100 MHz Waterhole is broken up into ten 10 MHz chunks. This chart has two series - with and without the antenna connected.